Ernest Powell
Ernest Roman Powell, infamous for having founded the Anglo-Saxon Alliance a militant, Far-Right political party. At a young age, Powell was brought up in an upper-middle class household by "old English" parents, and due to his parent's wealth he had access to a great deal of luxury in his youth. Given a classically liberal education by the Dr. William Marlborough, he would later be exposed to racialist theories and the writings of pro-segregation and slavery thinkers, influencing his own philosophy heavily. After a brief stint in the Provisional Defense Force, he would enter into politics as a member of the Dominion Party, serving as an MP until his death in 2230. Biography Youth Alec Powell, at the crisp age of seventeen, left the HMS Princess of Lisbon ''with his mother and father. His father, Archibald Powell was a lieutenant of the Royal Marines and had distinguished himself on several occasions during scouting expeditions onto the mainland. He retired from service in 2140 in order to raise a family with his new wife, Eleanor and had his first son in 2142. Unfortunately, the Powell's first and second child died at an early age, Alec being their third child was the first to survive. After Alec came six more children, and together the Powell family settled upon a four-acre plot of land on the outskirts of Tampico where they farmed about an acre of corn, barley and beans, the rest of their property they rented out to poorer families. For much of his youth and adolescence Alec toiled on his family's plot of land, and helped his father defend their property from marauders. Unfortunately the onset of tribal attacks forced the Powells to drive up their rent, and as a result, many of their renters left their property. Faced with losses and acres of unproductive land, the Powells were forced to sell off much of their estate to the area's new settlers. His family's financial troubles forced Alec to leave home and seek work in Tampico, attaining employment at a shirt factory, there he worked a sewing machine for fifteen hours a day, making 1£ an hour. The work was mundane and mind-numbingly boring, yet he worked diligently and efficiently and attained a promotion to the manager of his shift with a year of starting work. As a manager, he showed an aptitude for working with numbers, and was moved to the factory's three-man accounting department where he remained employed until he met his wife Margaret on his twenty-fifth birthday. Being the daughter of a sailor, Margaret was a short, pretty, dark-haired twenty-three-year-old when she met Alec. The two hit off almost immediately, they dated for a year and a half before Alec proposed to her, and both were married a month later. The couple moved to a small, low-rent apartment where they lived for the next ten years, working and saving what they could. By the time of Ernest's birth the latest of the Powell family had left the populated streets of Tampico and had settled upon a small farm near the growing village of Oldham. There they had Ernest, and thanks to their diligent saving they were able to live relatively comfortably. This was the world Ernest was born into in 2190. Ernest Roman Powell entered the world a screaming, kicking but healthy infant in the year 2190, he wasn't alive for a month when Archibald, now well into his nineties (a rarity in those days) died of consumption. Growing up in the Powell household, Ernest enjoyed a mixture of comfort and strain as he and his family were able to live comfortably upon their estate, and yet were faced with all the same dangers that accompanied life on the frontier. Tribal raids, mutant attacks and killer flora were simply a part of everyday life for young Ernest. However, unique to those living within the Dominion was the ever-present threat of political violence, as clashes between constables and members of the Hispanic majority were a commonplace in Oldham. Being mostly populated by middle to upper-class Anglos, Oldham had become an image of old world England, where men wore three-piece suits and bowler hats, and women stayed home, attended salons and always had the roast waiting on the table for their husband's return. Fearing the influence of radical political ideas that Ernest would be exposed to attending the town's school, they opted to have him educated at home, hiring the then-unknown William Marlborough to come in and provide the young Ernest with a classically liberal education. Dr. Marlborough, having attained his doctorate from the College of Tampico (then a small, thirty person institution with only one lecture hall) had become an expert on the classics, spending his time studying the writings of such men as Xenophon, Plato, Cicero, Marcus Cato and Cato the Younger. It was from these men that Ernest got his first taste of politics, philosophy, ethics, and rhetoric. Dr. Marlborough remained Ernest's tutor until he turned sixteen, at which time he began to apply for college. However, tuition proved to be too much for Ernest or his parents to afford, thus Ernest reserved himself to saving up until he could afford to attend the college for four years. Seeking employment and a steady income, Ernest joined up with the Provisional Defense Force on his eighteenth birthday. Military Service Having enlisted, Ernest was subjected to several months of rigorous physical training before being assigned to the famed Tampico Guard Grenadiers. Ernest was not naturally a soldier, having never properly acclimated to the rough life he lived on the frontier of the Protectorate's rule, nonetheless he attempted to make the best out of his situation, spending his spare time (of which there was always an abundance of) reading, writing, and engaging in political conversations with his fellow soldiers. It wasn't until 2210, the second year of his service, that things began to change for him. It was during a midnight raid by a band of Las Aztecas that his sergeant, Grant Horvath, was killed after being bludgeoned to death by an Azteca warrior. The attack, for the most part, had left Ernest's company decimated, among the dead were a half dozen of the company's officers. Without a functioning chain of command, and a days ride from the next nearest PDF outpost, the soldiers in their little stockade voted to elect their new officers. The survivors of Ernest's squad chose him to be their new squad leader and for the next week, he would lead them through near-constant attacks from Azteca warriors. Upon the relief of their position by soldiers of the Royal Fusiliers, Ernest's company had dwindled down to a mere six men holed up in the stockade's armory. For his service, Ernest was honorably discharged and awarded a pension. Political Career Following his departure from the military, Ernest returned to his wife and family. However, as that often happens with returning servicemen, Ernest's mind was plagued with images he couldn't shake, with memories he couldn't forget and harboring prejudices that embittered him to the Dominion's indigenous population. Having seen the full breadth of the native's savagery on the frontier, Ernest permanently carried with him a deep seeded hatred for all Hispanics, and as attempted to re-adjust to civilian life, the frustration he felt towards his wife and family, he directed towards Hispanics. When he finally decided to run for political office, he had become firmly set in the belief that the Dominion's Hispanic population were no better than the uncivilized savages that lived without it border, determining himself to make every effort to ensure that they never rose above the status of second-class citizens. It was with this mission that he formally joined the Dominion Party in 2215, quickly becoming aligned with the party's radical wing. Local Politician It was in 2216 that Ernest was first elected to the municipal council of Oldham, representing the town's second ward, a neighboorhood primarily made up of white middle-class families. Within the first month of being elected, Ernest was already pressing for radical reforms to the town's various ordinances, demanding that property ownership for Hispanics be restricted to the town's outskirts and third ward. Known as the "chollo district," Oldham's third ward had become synonymous with gangs, chems, and tenements as much of the town's Hispanic population had been forced to relocate there by the movement of whites into the area. Ernest further advocated for the use of a ward-pass system, the enforcement of segregated public facilities, and the passing of "white worker laws," effectively segregating the local labor market into a market for typically higher skilled whites, whom enjoyed special higher privileges over Hispanics, and the low skill market that was dominated by Hispanics, all of whom were subject to restrictions upon their ability to contract with employers, and faced a wage ceiling. For his fellow town councilmen, many of his demands proved to be too obtuse, too obtrusive, and too insulting to their more laissez-faire sensibilities. When Ernest proposed an extension of local welfare benefits to poorer whites, it was voted down by a vote of four to one, a fate many of his proposals were doomed to meet. However, it wasn't until the political violence that wracked the protectorate in its early years came about that his fellow councilmen began to take his raving with any degree of seriousness. It was in 2220 that the council finally passed the Municipal Segregation Ordinance, effectively forcing all Hispanic residents of Oldham to relocate to the city's third ward. With this success under his belt, Ernest began to look towards a position in Parliament, and in 2222 he chose to run for Parliament as the MP for County Nelson, in which Oldham was located. As he prepared himself for his electoral contest, he decided it would be prudent to write a personal manifesto encompassing his philosophy, beliefs and policy positions. This he published not three months later, entitling it: ''Race, Economics, and Ethics in Political Community. In it he called for separation of the races, the enforcement of "Repopulation Measures" meaning the forceful removal of Hispanics and other minorities to select regions (he referred to these as reservations), the placing of internal tariffs upon goods that were produced in said regions, and the total abolishment of any sort of state support to their populaces. As well he called for the removal of Hispanics from both the armed forces, and RTC. And it was upon this platform that he entered the electoral arena in 2222. Dominionist MP Having been elected from County Nelson, Ernest immediately began to push his agenda, to little avail. For the most part, the Dominionist Party looked upon Ernest (and most other members of the radical wing) as being nothing more than a nuisance to them, a temporary annoyance that would soon be alleviated by the return of election season. However at Ernest's tenure wore on, his raving and calls for total segregation and the establishment of apartheid in Tampico became louder and louder. Unfortunately for the more level-headed members of the Dominionist Party, this came at a time of a great unrest in the protectorate, as crowds of restless Hispanics tore the streets of Tampico apart, seeking retribution for wrongs committed to them by their white overlords. As these protests became more widespread and more volatile, Ernest's book began to gain traction among the more disaffected Anglos. Eventually, Ernest had gained enough followers that he decided to organize them for, as his biographer would later put it, "direct action." Calling his newfounded organization the Anglo-Saxon Enterprise Coalition he immediately began to organize rallies, and became ever more adamant in his segregationist beliefs, violently advocating for Hispanics to be "physically removed" from the Protectorate in order to preserve the integrity of the "Anglo-Saxon gene pool." To the public Ernest did his best to promote the Anglo-Saxon Enterprise Coalition as being a collection of small businessmen united in the common cause of promoting minority rights in Tampico, but in the shadows he and his more hard-line supporters were already planning a total reorganization of society. Their plan consisted of removing a majority of the Hispanic population, minus those deemed docile enough to be made serfs of the state. These Hispanic laborers (labeled "coloureds" by Powell and his men) would be used to drive forward the economy, working in the massive factories and farms that they envisioned would spring up as lands formerly held by Hispanics was put towards "productive" use. The whites would then be reorganized by their vocation into national labor unions, which, through cooperation with government planners, would be utilized in the eventual centralization of the economy. Otherwise, Ernest and his companions essentially planned to totally embrace a sort of systematic apartheid in Tampico, forcing all non-whites onto reservations, and utterly stripping them of their political rights. In order to enforce these policies, Ernest planned to either push them through Parliament, or to forcefully seize power and enforce them himself as Tampico's dictator. Yet, he gave no clue to his true intentions in public. When giving speeches to his swastika (they had adopted the three armed swastika) bearing followers he would often speak of racial cooperation, the value of the Hispanics in the Protectorate, and had famously met with some of the founding members of the Radical Left-wing group the Revolutionary Front. All of it was a facade. Death It was in 2230, that Ernest met his demise. On a mild April morning, in the midst of all the chaos that had been wracking the Protectorate, Ernest had set himself up on a soapbox and, before a crowd of trusted followers and onlookers, he began to work himself into one of his characteristic speeches. The speech quickly became a rant as he harangued the crowd about the necessity for racial separation, a goal, he claimed, that could be achieved through the peaceful cooperation of the races. It was maybe midway through his tirade that a lone figure in the back of the crowd opened his jacket and plucked a Sunset Sarsaparilla bottle filled with kerosene, and a rag stuffed in the top. Quickly tipping the bottle over to dampen the rag, and lighting it with the end of his cigarette, he heaved the molotov cocktail at Ernest, just as his guards were began to push through the crowd towards the lone assassin. It was said that Ernest watched the cocktail sail through the air towards his stand, but never did he break off his shouting, continuing to harangue the crowd even as the cocktail smashed on the box and showered him in burning kerosene and shards of glass. Several bystanders along with two of his guards were injured by the bomb, and Ernest himself suffered horrific third-degree burns over most of his upper torso. His followers, helped by nearby constables attempted to get him to a clinic, but he expired en route, howling in pain. Following his death, the Anglo-Saxon Enterprise Coalition, helmed by Ernest's right hand: Roderyck Oswald, reorganized itself as the Anglo-Saxon Alliance. Eschewing the veneer of racial cooperation, the alliance has since become known as a fringe, Far-Right party whose only major presence is in County Nelson. Personality & Characteristics As a young man, Ernest was well known among his pupils to be a man of great character. He was respectful, pleasant, friendly, and humble in his mannerisms and magnanimous towards his friends and family. For these reasons he had become quite popular amongst the villagers of Oldham, and it was noted by some of his closest friends that he was quite popular among the young ladies. From his instruction by Dr. Marlborough he had studied and mastered the art of rhetoric, and with the help of his instructor he honed his prose and his speech, giving him a certain eloquence when addressing crowds and friends alike. In this sense he was practically taught to be a politician, and yet his family's financial condition prevented him from entering politics as a young man. Ernest was no stranger to hard labor, as he had spent much of his youth assisting his Father on the Powell's estate, and through his labor, he gained an acute appreciation for the working man and the various struggles they endured. It was also a result of working for his father, that Ernest was quite physically fit, having been said to land a punch hard enough to knock anyone he couldn't charm onto their ass, and it was in his strength that he made up for his size. When he turned twenty-one, Ernest stood no taller than 5'2 which perhaps contributed to his labeling as being a "Sad, angry, little man" by his political opponents. Quotes By About Category:Characters